FDR in Rochester en route to a New Deal landslide, October 17th, 1936

The Unfinished Portrait is a watercolor of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Elizabeth Shoumatoff. Shoumatoff was commissioned to paint a portrait of President Roosevelt and started her work around noon on April 12, 1945. At lunch, Roosevelt complained of a headache and subsequently collapsed. The President, who had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage (stroke), died later that day. Shoumatoff never finished the portrait, but she later painted a new, largely identical one, based on memory. The Unfinished Portrait hangs at Roosevelt’s retreat, Little White House, in Warm Springs, Georgia, and its finished counterpart beside it. [gift of Jeanne Jackson to Carol Kramer]

In 1936, Roosevelt won the largest electoral landslide victory in American history, 523 – 6 (61% to 37% popular vote). Although Landon visited Rochester on September 15th, 1936, he was considered an ineffective campaigner who rarely traveled. With the national outcome little in doubt by October 17th, Roosevelt devoted much of his speech to promoting the re-election of NY Governor Lehman who had followed Roosevelt as Governor when FDR won his first presidential term in 1932.

Tue Sep 15 1936 page 8

Roosevelt would win Monroe County by a narrow margin; while its surrounding counties would vote for the Republican Landon.

Democrat and Chronicle, Sun Oct 18 1936 page 17

Within the context of the election of the 2016 campaign, the election of 1936 is notable for the leftward turn of the Democratic Party. In the summer of 1935, Roosevelt embarked on what historians call the “2nd New Deal.”

In 1935, Social Security began, the Wagner (or National Labor Relations) Act was passed and the Works Progress Administration was formed. The election was in many ways a referendum on the 2nd New Deal, and the result was 523 – 6.

Despite is overall popularity, the New Deal faced strong opposition. On the the same day the D & C reported on Roosevelt’s visit, it printed a letter by one of his detractors, echoing a common theme: Roosevelt was instigating class warfare.

To degrees, the current campaign also saw a leftward turn in the Democratic Party. A self-described democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders won 23 contests.

last time we had a democratic socialist president, they had to enact term limits because the American people elected him to office 4 times!

from The American Political Tradition (1948)

Sanders’ success in the primaries — and the leftward turn in the Democrat Party he embodies — opens up one of those tantalizing political parlor game questions. What if Sanders were the Democrat nominee, the beneficiary of Trump’s seeming implosion? Would Sanders be winning over Trumps’ working class supporters? Imagine one of Sanders’ slogans, A Political Revolution Is Coming going head to head with Make America Great Again.

In Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Patrician as Opportunist,” from The American Political Tradition (1948), Richard Hofstadter looks at FDR’s enormous success during the 1936 campaign.

As Hofstadter reminds us, 4 years earlier Roosevelt did not envision the New Deal as a leftward turn. Hofstadter notes that “Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign utterances indicate the New Deal had not yet taken form in his mind.”

According to Hofstadter, Roosevelt was by temperament more centrist than radical. As the New Deal unfolded Roosevelt’s alliance with the harder left “had not been planned; it had not even grown; it had erupted.” By 1935, Roosevelt had been “baited and frustrated by the right” and “die hard conservatives.” At the same time, the “organized and enheartened” left had adopted Roosevelt. As Hoftstadter says, it was at this point around 1935 — rejected by the right and adopted by the left — that Roosevelt’s “ego was enlisted along with his sympathies in behalf of the popular point of view.”

And the result of the merging of ego and sympathies was magnetic. As Hofstadter says:

It was doubtful, even in Andrew Jackson’s day, there had ever been such a close communion between a president and the great masses of the people as in the 1936 campaign.

’36 was more a love fest than a campaign. A little like what Bernie inspired 80 years later in the spring of ’16.

Talker of the Town is a continuation of conversations begun in three Democratic Chronicle blogs: Make City Schools Better, Unite Rochester and the Editorial Board.
Since February 2013, urban education has been the primary focus. Now, the flowering of topics is limited only by our imaginations.

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